2016: The Year in Film: "Suicide Squad" Review

So after the moderate to large sized disaster that was Batman V Superman (seriously, that movie was 85% hot trash and even though the film was a moderate financial success an expanded universe simply cannot be maintained on the back of poorly reviewed and generally bad films) Warner Brothers and DC were in need of a fresh start, something to propel them into the Marvel stratosphere. Hopes have been high concerning Suicide Squad, and DC clearly believes in the project, as they've been hyping it. (and especially Jared Leto's Joker for more than a year) The future of the DC film universe doesn't COMPLETELY rest in the hands of David Ayer and Suicide Squad, as Wonder Woman was the best part of BvS and the trailer released recently at Comicon looks great, but a well done and successful Suicide Squad is pretty key to DC's ambitions to match Disney and Marvel.

On paper, this seems like an intriguing and potentially great match. David Ayer, the writer of films like Training Day, the original Fast and the Furious and the writer/director of the underrated Brad Pitt WW2 tank vehicle Fury and the solid End of Watch (although it does seem suspect in retrospect that he likes the word "fury" so damn much...) has made a name for himself in making gritty, action packed, extremely masculine films with dark characters that pull very few punches. The "Suicide Squad" in DC comics and also depicted in the show Arrow on the CW is a group of villains who are enlisted by ARGUS (DC's version of SHIELD) to take on dangerous and/or deadly missions for the government under the threat of death. So the writer of Training Day writing and directing a movie about supervillains undertaking secret heroic missions starring Will Smith? This should be a home run, right?

The film features a bunch of villains we've never met considering that the DCU is 2 films old at this point, and introduces them to varying degrees of success. Deadshot (Will Smith) is a hitman who never misses. Harley Quinn (Margot Robie) is the Joker's girlfriend. Captain Boomerang is an Australian thief who has the worst name ever and throws boomerangs. Killer Croc is a giant man-reptile. Enchantress is a witch. Rick Flagg is a special forces soldier in charge of keeping them under control, etc.

The Good:  the cast is, by and large, solid. Will Smith turns in a predictably good and charismatic performance and is pretty damn convincing as the ultra competent Deadshot, who becomes a sort of co-leader of this crew. Margot Robie is pretty good as Harley Quinn, even if her accent appears to be the same one she used in Wolf of Wall Street and has me concerned that she only knows how to sound American if she adopts a ridiculous Brooklyn/Long Island accent that sounds like it's right out of Sopranos. Viola Davis is solid as Amanda Waller, the calculating and cold head of ARGUS. Joel Kinnaman is fine. Jai Courtney's Capt. Boomerang is intriguing. Additionally, there is humor to be found here, as Harley Quinn especially has some LOL-worthy lines. The first 20 or so minutes of this film is very well done and suggests that somewhere underneath everything else there might just exist a version of Suicide Squad that is a damn good movie... unfortunately that's not the one they chose to release.



The Bad: this movie is at once bloated and desperately needing more, which is also true of BvS and is, in my book, just maybe the worst sin a film can commit. Its characters are serviced and introduced at random and seemingly nonsensical intervals, with some getting extended flashbacks and backstories, others getting none, and some getting maybe one scene. The plot, insofar that a plot actually exists, is totally predictable and circular. i.e., the Suicide Squad is formed to fight threats that only emerge because the Suicide Squad is formed. The villains are pointless, lack motivation or backstory and are ill defined. Speaking of ill-defined, the film wants to be a superpowered version of Escape from NY or The Dirty Dozen, but WE DON'T EVEN GET A PLANNING SCENE WHERE THEY (and by extension "we") ARE TOLD WHAT THEIR MISSION IS. Only some characters actually know what the mission is, so it results in a bloated back half of the film that consists mainly of people wandering around with no impetus or motivation because no one is actually aware of what the threat actually is. The music. Sigh, the music in this thing is probably the worst part about it and maybe the worst use of soundtrack I've ever seen in a film. In a film that, like I said, lacks exposition, character backstories for most of its cast, and any description of the team's mission, the songs are so incredibly ham fisted and spot on that it's actively offensive to anyone who's left the house in the last decade. Extended scenes in this film feel basically like music videos, and the desperate attempt to parrot what Guardians of the Galaxy did so well is just an epic fail because of how spot-on and unsubtle the entire enterprise is. Also - I'm not sure whose decision this was - Ayer's or the studio's, but a significant amount of the film's marketing centered around Jared Leto's Joker. Watch that trailer, he's in 25% of it. He is in probably... 9 minutes of the film's 120 minutes runtime. It's basically a cameo, which is confusing considering how hyped up it was. If you're going to have hardly any Joker, why play up how much Joker you're going to have? He was fine and different - but he didn't add hardly anything at all.

All in all, the best compliment I can give to this movie is that it's at least twice as good as Batman v Superman, and that there are elements here that make me feel like this movie COULD HAVE been good. Will Smith and Margot Robie are worth watching, and the film itself is roughly 30% an 8/10 film, 20% a 5/10 film and 50% a 1/10 film. Disappointing, DC, although not irredeemably bad.

5/10